In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin as the world’s very first cryptocurrency. The code is open source, which means that it can be modified by anyone and freely used for other projects. Following Bitcoin, many other cryptocurrencies have launched with modified versions of this code. Litecoin was announced in 2011 by Charlie Lee with the goal of being the silver to Bitcoin’s ‘gold’. One of the largest differences between Bitcoin and Litecoin, is that Litecoin has a coin limit of 84 million, whereas Bitcoin has a coin limit of 21 million.
Why Litecoin?
Litecoin was created to improve upon Bitcoin. The key difference for end-users being the 2.5-minute time to generate a block, as opposed to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. For blockchain enthusiasts, Litecoin holds a much more significant difference to Bitcoin, and that is its different proof of work algorithm. You can read more about the difference in algorithms here.
Transaction Differences
The main transaction difference between Litecoin and Bitcoin is that Litecoin is able to confirm transactions faster. The details of the transaction differences are as follows:
- The faster block time of Litecoin reduces the risk of double spending attacks.
- Litecoin can handle a higher volume of transactions because of its faster block generation. If Bitcoin were to try to match this, it would involve significant updates to the code to the code that everyone on Bitcoin network is currently using.
- The disadvantage of this higher volume of blocks is that the Litecoin blockchain will be proportionately larger than Bitcoin’s, with more orphaned blocks.
- A merchant who has waited for a minimum of two confirmations would only need to wait five minutes, whereas they would need to wait 10 minutes for just one confirmation with bticoin.
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